Russia: Workshops and Colloquia
Since the early 1990s, an interdisciplinary Russian Studies Workshop,
sponsored by the University's Council on Advanced Studies, has met weekly
or every two weeks throughout the school year in Wilder House. The current
meeting time is Tuesday, 4.30-6.00 pm. The
faculty organizers are Sheila Fitzpatrick, Richard Hellie, and Ronald
Suny, and in recent years the core group of graduate students involved
have been historians, mainly of the Soviet period, together with smaller
numbers of political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists. Despite
its name, the Workshop also routinely covers non-Russian parts of the
former Soviet Union, and may also (depending on student interest) deal
with Eastern Europe. Presenters come from the University faculty and graduate
students, with up to half a dozen invited guests from outside each year.
Typically, a draft of a dissertation chapter or an article-in-progress
is pre-circulated to Workshop members and then discussed after a brief
introduction by the author.
By general agreement, the Workshop is one of the most important intellectual experiences for graduate students at Chicago, and it also serves as a focus of socializing for students in the Russian and related fields.
Periodically, a group of scholars (local and from the outside) working
on a particular theme is gathered for a one- or one-and-a-half-day conference
organized in connection with the Workshop.
Often, one or more advanced graduate students will be involved in such
a workshop-conference as presenter and/or co-organizer: for example,
Mark Edele was one of the presenters at the "Experience of War"
workshop-conference in Fall 2002, while Charles Hachten will be a presenter
and co-organizer of the "Household Economies" workshop conference
in Fall 2003.
Many students regularly attend more than one Workshop, although two
is usually seen as the practical limit for a regular commitment. Workshops
often attended by Russian History graduate students include Modern European
History, International History, Nationalities, and Anthropology of Modern
Europe (Susan Gal, faculty organizer).